Academic Interests

About

Elisabeth Schober is an economic anthropologist and globalisation studies scholar with research and teaching interests in maritime work, gender / sexuality, and the anthropology of energy. She holds a Magister degree in European Ethnology (2004, Karl-Franzens University, Graz), an MA in Nationalism Studies (2007, Central European University, Budapest) and a PhD in Sociology and Social Anthropology (2011, Central European University). She is part of the editorial collective of Focaal. Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology.

Her first research project explored changing border regimes between Slovenia and Austria and the (re-) construction of memories in the wake of the EU expansion of 2004. She published this work as a monograph ("Hinüberschauen und Wegsehen", Wissenschaftliche Schriftreihe des Pavelhauses, 2006). During her PhD, she conducted 21 months of ethnographic field research in South Korea, where US military bases have become a major source of discontent over the last few decades. A number of entertainment districts next to US-American installations in and near Seoul are at the center of her 2nd monograph (“Base Encounters. The US Armed Forces in South Korea”; Pluto Press, April 2016).

While a postdoctoral fellow at UiO (2012-2016), she was affiliated with Thomas Hylland Eriksen’s ERC-funded research project “Overheating: The Three Crises of Globalisation”. In her contribution to "Overheating", she has explored the economic, environmental, and social challenges emerging from the relocation of manufacturing processes from South Korea to the Philippines. In 2013 / 14, she spent seven months in Subic Bay - a site which was previously home to the largest US naval base overseas and is nowadays a center for the global shipbuilding industry. Major publications resulting from this work are an edited volume (“Identity destabilised. Living in an Overheated World”, co-edited with Thomas Hylland Eriksen) and a special issue of the journal Ethnos on “Economic Growth or Ecologies of Survival?” (also co-edited with T.H. Eriksen).

Schober is currently the Principal Investigator at "(Dis-) Assembling the Life Cycle of Container Ships" - a 3-year research project (2018-2021) funded with NOK 7 992 000 under the FRIPRO-"Young Research Talent"-Scheme of the Norwegian Research Council. Her third monograph (in preparation), building on this recent engagement, will focus on South Korea's shipbuilding industry and its responses to the current global crisis in the maritime world.

2018. “The (Un-)Making of Labour. Capitalist Accelerations and their Human Toll at a South Korean shipyard in the Philippines.” In Industrial Labor on the Margins of Capitalism. Edited by Chris Hann and Jonathan Parry. London: Berghahn Press, pp. 197-217.

2017. “Building a city: Korean capitalists and navy nostalgia in ‘overheated’ Subic Bay.” In An overheated world. An anthropological history of the early twenty-first century. Edited by Thomas Hylland Eriksen. London: Routledge.

2016. “Introduction. The Art of Belonging to an Overheated World.” (together with Thomas Hylland Eriksen). In Identity Destabilised: Living in an overheated world. Edited by Thomas Hylland Eriksen and Elisabeth Schober. London: Pluto Press, pp. 1-19.

2016. “Indigenous Endurance amidst Accelerated Change? The U.S. Navy, South Korean Shipbuilders and the Aeta of Subic Bay (Philippines).” In Identity Destabilised: Living in an overheated world. Edited by Thomas Hylland Eriksen and Elisabeth Schober. London: Pluto Press, pp.135-152.

2014. “’The colonized bodies of our women…’ Imaginative and Material Terrains of U.S. Military Entertainment on the Fringes of South Korea.” In Gender and Conflict: Embodiments, Discourses and Symbolic Practices. Edited by Frerks, Georg; Reinhilde König, and Annelou Ypelj, Farnham: Ashgate (“Gender in a global / local world” series).

2016. "Of dispossessions and reclamations: Anthropology in the time of crisis". (on James G. Carrier and Don Kalb's "Anthropologies of class", and Sharryn Kasmir and August Carbonella's "Blood and fire."). In Focaal.

Schober, Elisabeth (2018). The (Un-)Making of Labor: Capitalist Accelerations and Their Human Toll at a South Korean Shipyard in the Philippines, In Chris Hann & Jonathan Parry (ed.),
Industrial Labor on the Margins of Capitalism: Precarity, Class, and the Neoliberal Subject.
Berghahn Books.
ISBN 978-1-78533-678-2.
Chapter 8.
s 197
- 217
Show summary

In South Korea, 2011 was marked by the rise of a social movement against precarity, the emergence of which was dependent upon effective and affective mobilizing strategies amongst workers. The impetus was provided by a struggle at a shipyard in Pusan, where an activist held a crane occupied for 309 days. The role of affect in constituting neoliberal workplaces has recently received much attention in anthropology. The question of how emotions figure into the mobilizing efforts of labour, rather than those of management, however, has been overlooked. Hope and despair are two emotive themes amongst activists involved in the Hanjin dispute that are closely linked to the practice of suicide amongst unionized workers in the country. Since the 1997 Asian financial crisis, suicide has also become an all‐too‐ordinary response to pressures imposed upon an increasingly precarious Korean workforce. I look into the affective mobilizing cultures that have allowed the ‘Hope Bus’ movement to excel in Korea, and explore the less successful efforts that were made by Korean and Filipino activists to link up their struggles.

This paper examines the dynamics behind recent land and water appropriations in Subic Bay (Philippines). The communities adjacent to the former US Naval Base Subic Bay have undergone major transformations since the US military left in 1992. Through the establishment of a Freeport Zone, the area has become a hub for foreign direct investors seeking to profit from the Philippines’ low labour costs. Today, the most important investor in Subic is a South Korean conglomerate that has built one of the largest shipyards in the world in the area. The shipyard, providing labour to tens of thousands of workers, has also led to the dislocation of hundreds of subsistence fishers. With their old fishing grounds lost due to increasing pollution and newly established water boundaries, these villagers find that both the land and water they depend upon are increasingly becoming a scarce good.

Navigating Uncertainty: Large-Scale Mining and Micro-Politics in Sierra Leone Robert Pijpers’ research focuses on the entanglement of large-scale mining and everyday life in rural Sierra Leone. By scrutinizing ‘the micro-politics of large-scale mining’, he shows how different (groups of) people actively influence and draw upon the dynamics of large-scale mining in order to navigate, shape and potentially change the social realities of life. In 2006, London Mining reopened the iron ore mines in Marampa Chiefdom, Sierra Leone. This moment inspired ambiguous dynamics: it generated excitement and spurred a range of positive developments, such as improved infrastructure and increased employment opportunities, but also triggered new challenges and uncertainties: Who could get hold on new jobs, and how? How could different groups and individuals claim access to new opportunities, while averting negative effects? What would happen with villages that were to be resettled? Pijpers’ research situates this multifaceted situation in both a condition of uncertainty – a perspective that stresses the pervasive precarity and uncertainty of life in Sierra Leone – and a national post-war discourse that positions resource extraction as crucial to achieving development. In exploring these societal contexts and understanding how large-scale mining becomes entangled in every day life, his research brings to the fore numerous social, political, economic, environmental and historical dynamics, including systems of land governance, socio-economic expectations, histories and futures of extraction, ideas of development, the navigation of networks and the prominent roles of secrecy and deceit. Moreover, the focus on micro-politics illuminates the constantly shifting negotiations between different actors in Marampa´s mining hot-spot, incorporating the ongoing renegotiation of promise-and-problem effects that are common to mining projects globally.